And she would
put shame on me, and on your father before you long honourably
dead."
And there was no discussing the matter. As things were, Ah Kim
knew his mother was right. Not for nothing had Li Faa been born
forty years before of a Chinese father, renegade to all tradition,
and of a kanaka mother whose immediate forebears had broken the
taboos, cast down their own Polynesian gods, and weak-heartedly
listened to the preaching about the remote and unimageable god of
the Christian missionaries. Li Faa, educated, who could read and
write English and Hawaiian and a fair measure of Chinese, claimed
to believe in nothing, although in her secret heart she feared the
kahunas (Hawaiian witch-doctors), who she was certain could charm
away ill luck or pray one to death. Li Faa would never come into
Ah Kim's house, as he thoroughly knew, and kow-tow to his mother
and be slave to her in the immemorial Chinese way. Li Faa, from
the Chinese angle, was a new woman, a feminist, who rode horseback
astride, disported immodestly garbed at Waikiki on the surf-boards,
and at more than one luau (feast) had been known to dance the hula
with the worst and in excess of the worst, to the scandalous
delight of all.
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